10/15/2007 @ 6:00PM

John Mahaffie On The Future

A good futurist would never claim to be sure, but there are sometimes things that seem highly probable looking five, 10 or 20 years into the future. I was convinced by the late 1990s that some lab, somewhere, would attempt a human cloning by now. Perhaps it has been done, but has been kept secret. The science for cloning is fully in place, but perhaps the motivation to clone people, even by rogue scientists, has not come along yet.

What’s something that totally surprised you?

The totality of change following 9/11, in terms of the way the United States and the world took its attention so utterly off of a range of areas of social and technical progress, and put them on war and terrorism. Futurists focus a great deal on the possible and often on the desirable. My focus for 20 years has been on social and technological change, with an eye to global advancement. We’ve turned from that, or been forced to turn from that, to focus on security. Because of that, we’re losing ground on progress.

John Mahaffie has worked as a consulting futurist since 1987. He is a partner in Leading Futurists and founding member of the Association of Professional Futurists. He is the author of works including Future Work, Managing Your Future as an Association, and 2025: Scenarios of U.S. and Global Society, Reshaped by Science and Technology.